With intelligence agencies and police on the heels of the traced members of Tablighi Jamaat, the Kushinagar police caught 14 Jamaatis trying to escape to Nepal through the fields on Saturday.
In two separate operations, personnel of Ramkola and Kaptanganj police stations were tipped off that a sizeable number of Tablighi Jamaat members were trying to sneak into Nepal through corn fields. The teams started searching the fields and nabbed 14 Tablighi Jamaat members.
They are natives of Sirah district of Nepal and had entered India along with 27 other colleagues in February.
During grilling, these people denied attending the Delhi markaz event but admitted that they had visited several mosques across the state and had decided to enter Nepal after learning of heightened police surveillance after the Nizamuddin incident.
Kaptanganj Sub-Divisional Magistrate Arvind Kumar rushed to the spot with a medial team and after thermal screening, those caught were put in quarantine for two weeks.
Meanwhile, Kushinagar’s Superintendent of Police Vinod Kumar Mishra suspended six police personnel after a dozen coronavirus suspects, quarantined in Gandhi Smarak Inter College in Hata, escaped on Friday night.
Those suspended included Sub-Inspector Vijay Shankar Yadav, and constables Bhagwan Singh, Shyam Sunder, Anil Maurya, Satyam Rai and Subhash.
Meanwhile in Shamli, an FIR was registered against 12 Bangladesh citizens who attended the Jamaat congregation in Delhi in mid-March and were now in administrative quarantine at a college in Thana Bhawan area. Out of them, two persons tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday evening.
The accused were booked for violation of Foreigners Act, 1946 at Thana Bhawan police station. Besides, two others were booked for sheltering them in a mosque at Bhasani village and withholding information from the authorities.
Meanwhile, amidst reports of quarantined Jamaat members misbehaving with medical staff and police across the state, similar incidents were reported in Kanpur, Lucknow and other parts of the state.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has already ordered that National Security Act be invoked against these Jamaat members beside other sections of the Indian Penal Code.
In Lucknow, 12 Jamaat members from Saharanpur were found coronavirus positive and they created a ruckus at Balrampur hospital.
“These people abused medical staff, demanded non-veg food and locked the doors of their rooms. They openly embraced each other and drank water from one bottle,” the medical officers said.
The situation could be controlled only after the police reached there and initiated harsh steps against the errants.
An FIR was also registered against them.
Similar reports of ruckus created by quarantined Jamaat members also came from Bijnor, Basti, Meerut, Saharanpur, Agra and a dozen other places.
In Lucknow, Muslim cleric Maunala Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali and Shia cleric Maulana Saif Rizvi appealed to the Tablighi Jamaat members to conduct themselves properly and abide by the orders of medicos and law enforcing agencies.
They said that their acts were sullying the image of the entire community and also endangering the society of coronavirus spread.